I don't buy it. Sure, if you're planning to do something special, you can pick and choose all the bits the author talks about. But if you're doing that, you (

I don't buy it. Sure, if you're planning to do something special, you can pick and choose all the bits the author talks about. But if you're doing that, you (hopefully by definition) know what you're doing and are able to make intelligent choices about all of them. If you just want to build a web app, all you need do is pick one of the big 3 stacks and get going. The Microsoft Stack gives you everything you need with no mandatory decisions on your part. Same with LAMP (read the acronym and you've got your list of pieces). Even Rails has a standardized stack at this point. If you don't want to bother with the details, you don't need to.